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The Mobile Election: How smartphones will change the 2016 presidential race

By Dylan Byers

04/01/15 01:32 PM EDT

Four years ago today, President Barack Obama was gearing up to announce his reelection campaign, Mitt Romney was leading Newt Gingrich in the polls, and roughly one out of every three American adults owned a smartphone.

You read that right: In the spring of 2011, just 35 percent of American adults owned a smartphone, according to Pew Research. The Internet and social media may have been changing politics in myriad ways, but news consumption was mostly a sedentary experience.

Today, as Hillary Clinton prepares for the formal launch of her campaign, and as Jeb Bush and Scott Walker are neck and neck in the polls, roughly two out of every three American adults, or 64 percent, own a smartphone, according to a new report from Pew.

The new mobile reality is changing the state of news and advertising, and it will also change the dynamic of American politics — especially during the 2016 campaign season, journalists and political operatives said.

"Mobile is going to be the big thing in 2016," Chris Lehane, the Democratic strategist and Clinton White House alum, told the On Media blog. "It is what any sophisticated campaign will be trying to figure out and then maximize in 2016 — and all the campaigns from both parties will be in a race to see who can figure out the tools to best lever the power of mobile."?

On the consumption side, the rise in mobile will "change politics the same way it is changing American life broadly," said Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed. "People will organize and persuade on mobile devices and apps, the same way they live on them more broadly."

Sixty-eight percent of smartphone owners now use their phone to follow along with breaking news events, while 33 percent say that they do this “frequently," according to the Pew report. Though mobile usage is highest among younger Americans, news consumption is "common even among older smartphone owners," as "four-in-ten smartphone owners ages 65 and older use their phone at least occasionally to keep up with breaking news."

On the media side, the rise in mobile usage will increase the number of citizen reporters, whose influence on recent political campaigns has been quite significant. Video footage of an errant remark — from George Allen's "Macaca" moment in 2006 to Mitt Romney's "47 percent" moment in 2012 — can have more influence on a political campaign than any traditional news report.

"In 2011, one-third of Americans were essentially campaign trackers. Now two-thirds are," said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama spokesperson. "As we learned from the 47 percent video, catching a politician speaking bluntly in what they think is a private setting can change the course of a campaign."

New livestreaming applications like Periscope and Meerkat, which allow smartphone owners to stream live video footage directly to their Twitter followers, will now allow voters to witness such events in real time. "Every minute — literally every minute — of every day of the campaign will be available live to anyone who wants it, no matter where they are," former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer wrote last month.

Pfeiffer focused on the benefits of these services — greater engagement opportunities for millennials, the importance of Twitter followers — but there is also potential for the rise in mobile usage to exacerbate the already fractious and fractured state of American politics.

"Gaffes will blow up even faster. Partisan rooting will be even quicker and more intense," Henry Blodget, the editor and CEO of Business Insider, predicted. "Anonymous trolls will swarm Twitter and brand any news story that is not highly flattering to their team as 'bias.'"

On the campaign side, the rise in mobile usage will create new ways for campaigns to advertise and target voters, down to highly specified demographic groups.

"The ability to really translate the power and opportunity of big data to allow for nano-targeting communications with precision-targeted messaging is dependent on the ability to lever the power of mobile," Lehane explained. "There will be an explosion of mobile advertising in 2016; an explosion in using mobile to share campaign content; an explosion in using mobile to organize."

Lehane mapped out one scenario, in the fall of 2016, where "a voter identified by a campaign based on its data analytics will be nano-targeted via addressable mobile with ads, with social messages from their friends who have been engaged by the campaigns to reach out to their social network." On election day, Lehane predicted, campaigns will have information about the voter "based on GPS data, to both determine whether they have visited a voting poll and/or [provide] step by step directions of how to find the poll in their precinct."

At the most basic level, the rise in mobile usage will speed up the entire political process. Voters will have faster and more frequent access to campaign news and information, and campaigns will have better access to voters and their data.

"Mobile is really this generation's version of their car," Lehane said. "It is the platform where they spend much of their time; it is their TV, radio, movie screen, phone and computer all in one; it is what allows them to, in effect, travel beyond their current location by connecting them to various outlets from social to content to communications."